People's Fair 1970
The People's Fair Festival, was held in Steven's Point, WI, just north of Iola off Hy 49 on Cty MM, near the present-day Iola Winter Sports Club, on June 26th-28th 1970. It included erformances by Johnny Winter, Buddy Rich, Taj Mahal, Steve Miller, Chuck Berry, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Terry Reid, SRC, Buffy St. Marie and many more. After the success of the Sound Storm Festival, held on the York farm near Poynette in Columbia County, north of Madison, in late April, a second was organized. Unfortunately, it ended up more Altamont than Woodstock. Rumors of a festival to be held somewhere in central Wisconsin circulated for weeks before the official announcement on June 17, 1970. Earth Enterprises and Concert Promoters International purchased a plot of land that straddled the Portage/Waupaca County line near Iola, about 80 miles west of Green Bay and 140 miles north of Madison, and would hold a “People’s Fair” over the weekend of June 26–28. Although county officials briefly discussed whether the rock festival could be stopped, there was little they could do. Most of the festival activities would be held in Iola Township, which had no zoning laws that could be invoked. By Monday, June 22, promoters had begun preparing the site, and underground newspapers were publicizing the show. The Friday bill was to be topped by Woodstock veterans Melanie and Paul Butterfield, Taj Mahal, Ides of March and jazz drummer Buddy Rich. Saturday’s headliners were to include Spirit, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, Mason Proffit, Buffy St. Marie, Crow, and Brownsville Station. Chuck Berry and Ravi Shankar were set for Sunday. On all three days, local and regional bands would fill out the bill, including Siegal-Schwall, Soup, the Tayles, Short Stuff, Tongue, The Downchilds, Oz, SRC, the Bowery Boys (which later became Clicker), and Fuse (which included two future members of Cheap Trick). Not all of the scheduled acts played—Spirit didn’t—and some late additions did. Iggy and the Stooges played one of the weekend’s most memorable sets just before sunrise on Sunday morning. On Thursday, June 25, young people began to descend on the site. By Friday morning, 10,000 people were already camped out. Unlike Sound Storm, where many festival-goers had been able to sneak in for free, promoters set up a system of checkpoints to keep out those without tickets. A high wire fence encircled the site. The only road in quickly backed up for 10 miles, delaying the festival’s start. Music supposed to start at 11AM Friday didn’t begin until 6:00 that night, although nobody seemed to mind much. “The scene was the beginning of a big pot party,” a reporter wrote. A Saturday report in the Capital Times made the festival sound like a hippie paradise, and portrayed the event in a largely positive light: “In some ways, the festival resembles one of those medieval fairs that preceded the urbanization of Europe and its subsequent Renaissance.” And also: “Bubbles were very much in style and they floated through the frisbee-laced air...” Despite a lack of toilets and telephones (and an abundance of mosquitoes), “What was important was that thousands of like-minded youths had gathered together once again to reaffirm their own culture far from the boarded-up windows of State Street of frequent student protests at the University of Wisconsin and the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the cities.” The police claimed to be surprised: “Everything has gone real well,” a Waupaca County deputy told the Capital Times. Portage County Sheriff Nick Check said, “We’ve had more cooperation than we thought we would from the festival organizers and the young people themselves.” But the bubbly Renaissance frolic was actually much darker than advertised. There was a carnival atmosphere, except the cotton candy was LSD. It was also described as "an outdoor drug market, almost like a street you could walk up and down, where whatever you wanted you could have got.” Plus, there was a lot of alcohol. The ground was covered with wine bottles. The negative vibrations weren’t just chemical. Police had taken knives and guns from some attendees at the gate. At least one couple had sex openly while a large crowd watched them, and the woman involved may not have been participating willingly. There was also a definite Hells Angels or biker element along with the heavy drug vibe. The bikers did anything they wanted and took anything they wanted. Saturday night, a group of them got onstage while the Amboy Dukes were playing and scuffled with a security guard. The bikers tossed the guard off the stage, and he broke his collarbone. Even law-abiding bikers were intimidating, with knives and firearms openly displayed. Promoters eventually asked some of the bikers to leave. But with police involved mostly in controlling access to the area and no uniformed force on the grounds, there was no way to make the bikers go. During the overnight hours of Saturday, rumors spread of beatings and rapes, and tensions rose. The 200-acre festival site was partly wooded, with a long, sloping field that created a natural amphitheater. The only building on the site was an old barn with a lily pond nearby, which had been taken over by the bikers for a campsite. It was the lowest point on the site, to the left of the stage area. Just before 7:00 Sunday morning, people up the the hill began throwing bottles at the bikers below. Amid the barrage, a few bikers mounted up and charged. Despite the night of rumors, for many who were there, this was the first indication of real trouble. Scott Thomson, working for a company hired to provide stage security, remembers his boss sounding the alarm like Paul Revere: “The bikers are coming!” Paul and Bob Ericksen, who had traveled to the festival from Escanaba, Michigan, watched it all from their campsite. “Chicks were on the handlebars, shooting,” Bob remembers. Three people were wounded, but it could have been worse—especially for the bikers. After the shooting stopped, angry attendees kept flinging bottles and rocks at them. The bikers fled, a few leaving their bikes behind, which were promptly set on fire by the crowd. A total of 23 bikers (17 men and six women) were arrested on the road outside. Portage County Sheriff Nick Check later claimed that the bikers had “thanked the pigs, for saving their lives” from the beating they took. After the shootings, people started leaving. At the festival’s height, estimates put the crowd between 40,000 and 60,000. By Sunday evening, only five or six thousand remained to see the last few bands. Cops stopped everybody on the way out, asking if they could identify the shooters. Charges filed against the bikers included causing injury by conduct regardless of life and carrying concealed weapons. Those wounded in the Sunday rumble were reported in good condition on Monday. But in the festival’s aftermath, Sheriff Check was no longer praising the event. He called it “a nice, big, organized, lawless drug party” and vowed that there would never be a repeat: “We’ll keep people out if it means blocking off half the county.” The same newspapers that had painted the festival as generally peaceable on Friday and Saturday now called it “generally violent and troubled.” Stories stressed the lack of drinking water, rampant drug use, and even the poor sound system. Local residents were scandalized by the whole thing. “I have never seen such filth, so many young boys and girls completely out of it,” one told the Appleton Post-Crescent. “The officers did everything they could, but what can you do?” Sheriff Check called the violence “a blessing” for calling attention to what went on at rock festivals. And in the weeks following, officials took steps to limit future events. A state Senate committee held a hearing in mid-July at which Attorney General Robert Warren unveiled a proposed festival law for counties to adopt. Among its provisions were minimum requirements for sanitation, shelter, security, traffic control, telephones, and medical personnel. Columbia County, where the Sound Storm Festival had been held in April, was the first to adopt Warren’s proposal, and other Wisconsin counties were eager to follow. By February 1971, 65 of the state’s 72 counties had some kind of restrictions on mass gatherings. That didn’t mean organizers gave up on Wisconsin entirely. The Iola promoters planned a festival for Galena, Illinois, in August, but when they were slapped with a permanent injunction against it, they briefly considered moving across the state line to Grant County. (The festival was ultimately held in northeast Iowa near Wadena.) A proposed 1971 festival in Adams County never happened. Smaller events were held, such as the event in Rock County west of Janesville that attracted about 8,000 fans on a single day in May of ’71. But after Iola, the brief era of mass, multi-day festivals in Wisconsin was over. Across the country, the pattern was the same, as young people’s desire to replicate the Woodstock experience clashed with their elders’ desire to avoid future Altamonts. As a result, the festival movement peaked in 1970 and was largely over by the end of 1971. But it wasn’t conflict with The Man alone that caused the festival movement to fade. The new consciousness of the young didn’t remake the world; the bomber-jet planes didn’t turn into butterflies. And people began to realize that what had happened on Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969 and at Sound Storm in 1970 was not repeatable indefinitely. Woodstock and Sound Storm—and Iola—were unique constellations of circumstance, in a moment that passed as quickly as it had come.